Sir,—
Before this election began you were guilty of gross impertinence in writing a letter to my wife,—to her extreme annoyance and to my most justifiable anger. Any gentleman would think that the treatment you had already received at her hands would have served to save her from such insult, but there are men who will never take a lesson without a beating. And now, since you have been here, you have presumed to offer to shake hands with me in the street, though you ought to have known that I should not choose to meet you on friendly terms after what has taken place. I now write to tell you that I shall carry a horsewhip while I am here, and that if I meet you in the streets again before I leave the town I shall use it.
FERDINAND LOPEZ.
Mr. Arthur Fletcher.
This letter he sent at once to his enemy, and then sat late into the night thinking of his threat and of the manner in which he would follow it up. If he could only get one fair blow at Fletcher his purpose, he thought, would be achieved. In any matter of horsewhipping the truth hardly ever gets itself correctly known. The man who has given the first blow is generally supposed to have thrashed the other. What might follow, though it might be inconvenient, must be borne. The man had insulted him by writing to his wife, and the sympathies of the world, he thought, would be with him. To give him his due, it must be owned that he had no personal fear as to the encounter.
That night Arthur Fletcher had gone over to Greshamsbury, and on the following morning he returned with Mr. Gresham. "For heaven's sake, look at that!" he said, handing the letter to his friend.
"Did you ever write to his wife?" asked Gresham, when he read it.
"Yes;—I did. All this is dreadful to me;—dreadful. Well;—you know how it used to be with me. I need not go into all that; need I?"
"Don't say a word more than you think necessary."
"When you asked me to stand for the place I had not heard that he thought of being a candidate. I wrote and told her so, and told her also that had I known it before I would not have come here."
"I don't quite see that," said Gresham.
"Perhaps not;—perhaps I was a fool. But we needn't go into that. At any rate there was no insult to him. I wrote in the simplest language."
"Looking at it all round I think you had better not have written."